Canada

Keypoints-based approaches have shown to be promising for retinal image registration, which superimpose two or more images from different views based on keypoint detection and description. However, existing approaches suffer from ineffective keypoint detector and descriptor training. Meanwhile, the non-linear mapping from 3D retinal structure to 2D images is often neglected. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based junction detection approach for retinal image registration, which enhances both the keypoint detector and  descriptor training. To improve the keypoint detection, it uses a multi-task vessel detection to regularize the model training, which helps to learn more representative features and reduce the risk of over-fitting. To achieve effective training for keypoints description, a new constrained negative sampling approach is proposed to compute the descriptor loss. Moreover,  we also consider the non-linearity between retinal images from different views during matching. Experimental results on FIRE dataset show that our method achieves mean area under curve of 0.850, which is 12.6% higher than 0.755 by the state-of-the-art method. All the codes are available at https://github.com/samjcheng/SuperJunction.

AAAI 2024

SuperJunction: Learning-Based Junction Detection for Retinal Image Registration | VIDEO

retinal image

image registration

machine learning

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) play a pivotal role in the realm of embodied artificial intelligence. Although there are effective methods like program-of-thought  prompting which uses programming language to tackle complex reasoning tasks, the specific impact of code data on the improvement of reasoning capabilities remains under-explored. To address this gap, we propose complexity-impacted reasoning score (\ours), which combines structural and logical attributes, to measure the correlation between code reasoning steps and reasoning abilities. Specifically, we use the abstract syntax tree to encode the structural information and calculate logical complexity by considering the difficulty and the cyclomatic complexity. Through an empirical analysis, we find not all code data of complexity can be learned or understood by LLMs. Optimal level of complexity is critical to the improvement of reasoning abilities by program-aided prompting. Then we design an auto-synthesizing and stratifying algorithm and apply it to instruction generation for mathematical reasoning  and code data filtering for code generation tasks. Extensive results demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Code and datasets are in the supplementary and will be released.

When Do Program-of-Thought Works for Reasoning?

Convolutional neural networks-based video de-raining methods commonly rely on dense intensity frames captured by CMOS sensors. However, the limited temporal resolution of these sensors hinders the capture of dynamic rainfall information, limiting further improvement in de-raining performance. This study aims to overcome this issue by incorporating the neuromorphic event signal into the video de-raining to enhance the dynamic information perception. Specifically, we first utilize the dynamic information from the event signal as prior knowledge, and integrate it into existing de-raining objectives to better constrain the solution space. We then design an optimization algorithm to solve the objective, and construct a de-raining network with CNNs as the backbone architecture using a modular strategy to mimic the optimization process. To further explore the temporal correlation of the event signal, we incorporate a spiking self-attention module into our network. By leveraging the low latency and high temporal resolution of the event signal, along with the spatial and temporal representation capabilities of convolutional and spiking neural networks, our model captures more accurate dynamic information and significantly improves de-raining performance. For example, our network achieves a 1.24dB improvement on the SynHeavy25 dataset compared to the previous state-of-the-art method RMFD, while utilizing only 39% of the parameters.

Neuromorphic Event Signal-Driven Network for Video De-raining

Cross-domain named entity recognition (NER) tasks encourage NER models to transfer knowledge from data-rich source domains to sparsely labeled target domains. Previous works adopt the paradigms of pre-training on the source domain followed by fine-tuning on the target domain. However, these works ignore that general labeled NER source domain data can be easily retrieved in the real world, and soliciting more source domains could bring more benefits. Unfortunately, previous paradigms cannot efficiently transfer knowledge from multiple source domains. In this work, to transfer multiple source domains' knowledge, we decouple the NER task into the pipeline tasks of mention detection and entity typing, where the mention detection unifies the training object across domains, thus providing the entity typing with higher-quality entity mentions. Additionally, we request multiple general source domain models to suggest the potential named entities for sentences in the target domain explicitly, and transfer their knowledge to the target domain models through the knowledge progressive networks implicitly. Furthermore, we propose two methods to analyze in which source domain knowledge transfer occurs, thus helping us judge which source domain brings the greatest benefit. In our experiment, we develop a Chinese cross-domain NER dataset. Our model improved the F1 score by an average of 12.50% across 8 Chinese and English datasets compared to models without source domain data.

Three Heads Are Better than One: Improving Cross-Domain NER with Progressive Decomposed Network

The objective of stylized speech-driven facial animation is to create animations that encapsulate specific emotional expressions. Existing methods often depend on pre-established emotional labels or facial expression templates, which may limit the necessary flexibility for accurately conveying user intent.
In this research, we introduce a technique that enables the control of arbitrary styles by leveraging natural language as emotion prompts. This technique presents benefits in terms of both flexibility and user-friendliness.
To realize this objective, we initially construct a Text-Expression Alignment Dataset (TEAD), wherein each facial expression is paired with several prompt-like descriptions. We propose an innovative automatic annotation method, supported by CahtGPT, to expedite the dataset construction, thereby eliminating the substantial expense of manual annotation.
Following this, we utilize TEAD to train a CLIP-based model, termed ExpCLIP, which encodes text and facial expressions into semantically aligned style embeddings. The embeddings are subsequently integrated into the facial animation generator to yield expressive and controllable facial animations. Given the limited diversity of facial emotions in existing speech-driven facial animation training data, we further introduce an effective Expression Prompt Augmentation (EPA) mechanism to enable the animation generator to support unprecedented richness in style control.
Comprehensive experiments illustrate that our method accomplishes expressive facial animation generation and offers enhanced flexibility in effectively conveying the desired style.

ExpCLIP: Bridging Text and Facial Expressions via Semantic Alignment

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various fields, and two powerful techniques, feature normalization and attention mechanisms, have been widely used to enhance model performance. However, they are usually considered as two separate approaches or combined in a simplistic manner.
In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic relationship between feature normalization and attention mechanisms and propose an Efficient Attention module guided by Normalization, dubbed EAN. Instead of using costly fully-connected layers for attention learning, EAN leverages the strengths of feature normalization and incorporates an Attention Generation (AG) unit to re-calibrate features. The proposed AG unit exploits the normalization component as a measure of the importance of distinct features and generates an attention mask using GroupNorm, L2 Norm, and Adaptation operations. By employing a grouping, AG unit and aggregation strategy, EAN is established, offering a unified module that harnesses the advantages of both normalization and attention, while maintaining minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, EAN serves as a plug-and-play module that can be seamlessly integrated with classic backbone architectures. Extensive quantitative evaluations on various visual tasks demonstrate that EAN achieves highly competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art attention methods while sustaining lower model complexity.

EAN: An Efficient Attention Module Guided by Normalization for Deep Neural Networks

Although deep generative models have greatly improved one-shot video-driven talking head generation, few studies address fine-grained controllable facial expression editing, which is crucial for practical applications. Existing methods rely on a fixed set of predefined discrete emotion labels or simply copy expressions from input videos. This is limiting as expressions are complex, and methods using only emotion labels cannot generate fine-grained, accurate or mixed expressions. Generating talking head video with precise expressions is also difficult using 3D model-based approaches, as 3DMM only models facial movements and tends to produce deviations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework enabling fine-grained facial expression editing in talking face generation. Our goal is to achieve expression control by manipulating the intensities of individual facial Action Units (AUs) or groups. First, compared with existing methods which decouple the face into pose and expression, we propose a disentanglement scheme to isolates three components from the human face, namely, appearance, pose, and expression. Second, we propose to use input AUs to control muscle group intensities in the generated face, and integrate the AUs features with the disentangled expression latent code. Finally, we present a self-supervised training strategy with well-designed constraints. Experiments show our method achieves fine-grained expression control, produces high-quality talking head videos and outperforms baseline methods.

FG-EmoTalk: Talking Head Video Generation with Fine-Grained Controllable Facial Expressions

Supervised Contrastive Loss (SCL) is popular in visual representation learning.
    Given an anchor image, SCL pulls two types of positive samples, i.e., its augmentation and other images from the same class together, while pushes negative images apart to optimize the learned embedding. In the scenario of long-tailed recognition, where the number of samples in each class is imbalanced, treating two types of positive samples equally leads to the biased optimization for intra-category distance. In addition, similarity relationship among negative samples, that are ignored by SCL, also presents meaningful semantic cues. To improve the performance on long-tailed recognition, this paper addresses those two issues of SCL by decoupling the training objective. Specifically, it decouples two types of positives in SCL and optimizes their relations toward different objectives to alleviate the influence of the imbalanced dataset. We further propose a patch-based self distillation to transfer knowledge from head to tail classes to relieve the under-representation of tail classes. It uses patch-based features to mine shared visual patterns among different instances and leverages a self distillation procedure to transfer such knowledge. Experiments on different long-tailed classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. For instance, it achieves the 57.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-LT dataset. Combined with the ensemble-based method, the performance can be further boosted to 59.7%, which substantially outperforms many recent works. Our code will be released.

Decoupled Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition | VIDEO

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that allows joint refinement of camera pose and scene geometry represented by decomposed low-rank tensor, using only 2D images as supervision. First, we conduct a pilot study based on a 1D signal and relate our findings to 3D scenarios, where the naive joint pose optimization on voxel-based NeRFs can easily lead to sub-optimal solutions.Moreover, based on the analysis of the frequency spectrum, we propose to apply convolutional Gaussian filters on 2D and 3D radiance fields for a coarse-to-fine training schedule that enables joint camera pose optimization.Leveraging the decomposition property in decomposed low-rank tensor, our method achieves an equivalent effect to brute-force 3D convolution with only incurring little computational overhead. To further improve the robustness and stability of joint optimization, we also propose techniques of smoothed 2D supervision, randomly scaled kernel parameters, and edge-guided loss mask. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves superior performance in novel view synthesis as well as rapid convergence for optimization.

Improving Robustness for Joint Optimization of Camera Pose and Decomposed Low-Rank Tensorial Radiance Fields

We introduce a conceptually simple yet effective method to create small, compact decision trees - by using splits found via Symbolic Regression (SR). Traditional decision tree (DT) algorithms partition a dataset on axis-parallel splits. When the true boundaries are not along the feature axes, DT is likely to have a complicated structure and a dense decision boundary. In this paper, we introduce SR-Enhanced DT (SREDT) - a method which utilizes SR to increase the richness of the class of possible DT splits. We evaluate SREDT on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Despite its simplicity, our method produces surprisingly small trees that outperform both DT and oblique DT (ODT) on supervised classification tasks in terms of accuracy and F-score. We show empirically that SREDTs decrease inference time (compared to DT and ODT) and argue that they allow us to obtain more explainable descriptions of the decision process. SREDT also performs competitively against state-of-the-art tabular classification methods, including tree ensembles and deep models. Finally, we introduce a local search mechanism to improve SREDT and evaluate it on 56 PMLB datasets. This mechanism shows improved performance on 77.2% of the datasets, outperforming DT and ODT. In terms of F-Score, local SREDT outperforms DT and ODT in 82.5% and 73.7% of the datasets respectively and in terms of inference time, local SREDT requires 25.8% and 26.6% less inference time than DT and ODT respectively.

Symbolic Regression Enhanced Decision Trees for Classification Tasks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in vision classification tasks. However, they exhibit vulnerability to additional noises known as adversarial attacks. Previous studies hypothesize that this vulnerability might stem from the fact that high-accuracy DNNs heavily rely on irrelevant and non-robust features, such as textures and the background. In this work, we reveal that edge information extracted from images can provide relevant and robust features related to shapes and the foreground. These features assist pretrained DNNs in achieving improved adversarial robustness without compromising their accuracy on clean images. A lightweight and plug-and-play EdgeNet is proposed, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing pretrained DNNs, including Vision Transformers, a recent family of state-of-the-art models for vision classification. Our EdgeNet can process edges derived from either clean nature images or noisy adversarial images, yielding robust features which can be injected into the intermediate layers of the frozen backbone DNNs. The cost of obtaining such edges using conventional edge detection algorithms (e.g., Canny edge detector) is marginal, and the cost of training the EdgeNet is equivalent to that of fine-tuning the backbone network with techniques such as Adapter.

SuperJunction: Learning-Based Junction Detection for Retinal Image Registration | VIDEO

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